RelayRides is the world's first peer-to-peer carsharing service. Our revolutionary service provides the technology, infrastructure and marketplace for car owners to securely and conveniently rent out their vehicles when they are not using them personally. This provides people seeking convenient transportation with a new option, and makes it easier for urban dwellers to enjoy mobility without owning a car.

As the average US car is driven only 66 minutes a day, RelayRides represents the first opportunity for car owners to monetize this underused asset. By providing the infrastructure, technology and marketplace for car owners to rent out their vehicles, RelayRides gives current car owners the means to monetize a largely underused asset. By enrolling in RelayRides, owners turn a car from an expense into a cash machine, with average profit of approximately $3,550 annually (net of depreciation costs).

How RelayRides Works:

Car owners list their vehicle on the RelayRides website, designate availability, rental price, and who may rent the vehicle (via Facebook and other social networks). Car renters browse available vehicles on RelayRides.com, reserve a car by the hour or day, and swipe an issued card over a card reader sensor on the vehicle for access during rental.

All existing carsharing services employ a model where they own, clean, and maintain the vehicles, and pay for parking, which makes the model very capital intensive and difficult to run profitably. This leads to a lack of availability (as high utilization rates must be maintained) and high hourly rental rates, and makes the model very difficult to scale.

With extremely low fixed costs and a vast network of potential vehicles, RelayRides provides renters increased diversity and availability of cars with less expensive hourly rental rates than current rental options. Further, the capital efficiency of the model will allow us to operate profitably in less dense urban areas, and potentially even suburban areas, where traditional carsharing services could never operate, as they could never generate the necessary demand to maintain high utilization rates and reach profitability.

Joe has been with Google Ventures since 2009, and his primary areas of focus are mobile, gaming, and local services.
Prior to Google Ventures, Joe was a two-time entrepreneur. In 1993, he co-founded Excite.com, an early Internet search engine, hol...